Conferences are a crucial part of Professional Association management. They give members an opportunity to connect, network, and develop professionally. Choosing the right theme for your Conference can greatly impact membership turnout, engagement, and reviews! Below, we will explore the different ways to ensure that your theme draws members in and provides a cohesive narrative for your association’s conference.
Know Your Audience: Find Out What Makes Your Membership Tick!
Your Conference theme does not necessarily have to be thrilling; it just has to resonate with your membership’s current struggles within their field. Identify what troubles your membership, how changes affect their work, opportunities for skill development, and ways to explore new opportunities. Rather than your conference theme being “Innovation,” consider a theme like: “Leading Through Workforce and Technological Transformations.” The latter theme directly connects to issues that your membership faces and will draw more attention to your conference from the start.
Be sure to recognize patterns within your membership engagement with previous conferences, social media posts, and newsletters to determine how best to reach your broad audience.
A strong conference theme is both relevant and aspirational. It must tackle the issues facing the industry today while also helping members feel optimistic and excited about the future of the field. Themes that are too abstract or academic may fall flat, so consider strong, clear objectives for membership to aspire to.
How to Ensure your Conference tells the Right Story:
A good conference theme allows for multiple avenues to explore. For example, a theme about “Navigating Change in the Industry” could touch on leadership, workforce development, risk management, sustainability, and project innovation. A narrow theme does not allow for the diversity of sessions that makes a conference truly engaging! The narrative that your conference creates should accurately reflect your association’s current struggles, goals, and overall mission.
Connecting your theme to a story is more memorable for attendees and makes the conference more cohesive. While sessions should be diverse, they should answer the question: “How does this session help deliver on the conference’s overall theme?” Testing several themes for a conference with your board members, sponsors, speakers, and membership is a great way to ensure your idea for a theme is strong, relevant, and tells the right story for your association.
A Simple Formula for Success: Challenges + Opportunity + Member Benefit
Finally, your theme should follow a simple formula to drive engagement from your audience: identify a current challenge, explore its possibilities for future opportunities, and highlight the benefit of adapting to members. To maximize participation in your conference, members should feel like the theme directly relates to what they are currently dealing with and provides them with a way to learn how others are solving those issues. Beginning your conference planning with a strong theme allows success to follow through diverse sessions, a relatable narrative, and maximum membership engagement.
Happy Planning!